BWI: World’s Biggest Hotel Search Engine Launched by iXiGO.com

Press release from Business Wire India
Source: iXiGO
Thursday, January 22, 2009 12:17 PM IST (06:47 AM GMT)
Editors: General: Consumer interest, Travel & tourism; Business: Advertising, PR & marketing, Business services, Hospitality, Information technology, Travel & tourism; Technology
Release no: 19034
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World's Biggest Hotel Search Engine Launched by iXiGO.com
Searches 220,000 Budget & Luxury Hotels Across 23,400 Cities in 202 Countries

New Delhi, Delhi, India, Thursday, January 22, 2009 -- (Business Wire India) -- iXiGO.com, India's largest travel search engine today announced the launch of the world's biggest hotel search engine, with easy to use and never seen before functionalities for its users. Now, travelers across the world can search for rates and availability, in real-time, across more than 220,000 hotels, hostels, heritage properties, serviced apartments, home-stays, guest houses and villas.

This latest offering from iXiGO.com, India's fastest growing travel site, empowers globetrotters to choose from a wide variety of accommodations from multiple hotel sites, all of which are bookable with instant confirmation on the respective hotel booking website. A sample search on iXiGO's hotel search engine for accommodation in London found over 850 hotels, with 20 properties within the city below US$20 (Rs. 1000) per room-night and for Paris, the search fetched more than 1380 properties with prices ranging from US$ 29 (Rs. 1400) to US$ 1000 (Rs. 49,000) per room-night. This included 600 properties in the budget category (less than US$ 100 /Rs. 5000 per room-night) and 33 five-star properties. A New Delhi search found over 250 hotels starting from US$7 (Rs 315) per room-night. Similar searches for cities all over the world, e.g. Nairobi (Kenya), Santiago (Chile), Reykjavik (Iceland) and Guangzhou (China), found numerous hotel deals with a large variety of choices for selection by location, prices and star-ratings. According to market research conducted by the company, no other travel site globally offers more hotel inventory with real-time search and booking.

Speaking on the occasion of the launch, Mr. Aloke Bajpai, Founder & CEO remarked - "With our ability to integrate niche hotel aggregators quickly, we have gone from being India's biggest, to being the world's biggest hotel search in just over eight months, now, aggregating nearly 50 hotel booking providers globally". Nitin Gurha, VP, Travel Partnerships added - "Now travelers have a uniquely comprehensive, unbiased and easy-to-use metasearch platform for narrowing down their choice of hotels based on their preferences of location, amenities, rates and hotel booking site. Hotel sellers worldwide get a neutral and unbiased 'hotel marketplace' that not only acts as a marketing medium, but also generates highly qualified online-leads for fulfillment. Our platform allows consumers to choose hotels based not only on price, but also on the unique value each and every property delivers".

iXiGO.com had launched its Indian hotel search engine in April, 2008 and has since established content partnerships with multiple hotel aggregators including HostelsClub, HotelsCombined, Travelguru, Inasra and Intech. These relationships allow travelers using iXiGO.com to search and compare prices across nearly 50 hotel booking websites worldwide and give consumers more than 6 million real time bookable hotel-rooms. In addition to descriptions and pictures of hotels, this launch also introduces some cutting-edge features and usability tools never seen before on hotel search sites, including city-maps with hotel markers, city-landmarks and pictures, search by distance from an address, location-based search, filters for amenities, property-types and hotel-chains, aggregation of travel reviews from multiple review sites and comparison of hotel room-rates for the exact same hotel-room from multiple hotel websites on a single page.

iXiGO.com has experienced phenomenal growth since its launch due to its customer friendliness, supplier-centric business model and a strong focus on product innovation. iXiGO allows consumers to search across all available travel inventory and book on travel sites directly by redirecting to their final booking page. Since it does not sell anything itself, iXiGO can aggregate flight, hotel and bus deals from multiple travel sites. Travelers view it as a comprehensive source of information for travel related products while travel suppliers find this a perfect marketing channel to showcase their key differentiators. iXiGO has been named among India's hottest startups by Wall Street Journal / Mint and BusinessToday.

About iXiGO.com:

iXiGO.com ® is India's leading online travel search engine based out of Gurgaon. Launched in June 2007, iXiGO has been recognized by various national and international awards for its unique market approach, product usability, and passionate management team. iXiGO is driven by an entrepreneurial team of young IITians and INSEAD MBAs and has raised seed capital from BAF Spectrum Pte Ltd, a Singapore based early stage investment fund. For more information about iXiGO please visit www.ixigo.com.

Contact for Partnerships and Affiliations:
partners@ixigo.com, +91 124 4045281


CONTACT DETAILS
Shudeep Majumdar, iXiGO, +91 9899960914, shudeep@ixigo.com

KEYWORDS
CONSUMER, TOURISM, MARKETING, BUSINESS SERVICES, HOSPITALITY, TRAVEL, TECHNOLOGY

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